18 hours ago
4
One of the problems with sport, imported from heartwarming mid-90s books about Man Feelings and their attendant movie adaptations featuring Colin Farrell looking sad in a hoodie, is the idea that football in particular has something to tell us about life. In many ways this is correct. It’s just that the things football has to tell us are not always good or helpful.
For example, the concept of the zero-sum game. It’s not a zero-sum game. People say this a lot now, often in the context of some reductive and binary argument, the kind of internet shouting match where there can be only one winner, that for one party to succeed it must necessarily be bad for everyone else, without nuance or shared benefits and burdens. Grownups are always insisting that it’s not a zero-sum game.
Except, football actually is a zero-sum game. This is just one of the sport’s really bad life lessons, modelling a universe where to be a loser is to be a fraud, weakling and moral vacuum, where the only options are victory or shame, where managers will be routinely mocked for trying to get around this with their alternative metrics, their process and performance. Win or fail. It’s that simple. Cry more.
This is clearly a false model in football too, where it is also necessary to learn and improve, to take chances, to fail again, fail better. In particular it has been bad news for Arsenal, who travel to Old Trafford’s vale of lost souls on Sunday pursued as ever by notions of the fatal flaw, the idea that something is fundamentally rotten in their season, with an ongoing debate among pundits and voices on the internet designed to establish the exact nature of this unarguable failure. What, exactly, has gone wrong with Arsenal? Maybe the answer is: nothing.
Given the surrounding weather, this takes some getting used to as an idea. The obvious objection is that finishing second in the Premier League, as Arsenal probably will, is axiomatically a failure. And that finishing second when first was there for the taking counts as a double failure. But is any of this true?
Some context may help. Should they finish second for a third straight season Mikel Arteta’s team will be the third most consistently successful version of Arsenal ever, in a top-tier existence stretching back to 1904. The only Arsenal eras to surpass this run of league finishes are the Herbert Chapman-built team of the early 30s and the peak Wenger years, 1998-2005, when Arsenal spent eight seasons in the top two, when they had Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira and a culture-busting manager.
Third-best Arsenal ever, then, on league finishes at least, and built out of the fourth-highest net transfer spend in the league across Arteta’s time at the club. During Arteta’s reign Arsenal have gone eighth, eighth, fifth, second, second and (probably) second. Take away Liverpool’s brilliant season and they would be top. Is this really a problem that needs solving? How is it possible to construct even the most marginalised of Arteta-must-go subcultures out of this upturn in fortunes?
Except, the title was there for the taking! But was it? The world’s strongest league, thronging with ambitious, robust teams, is never going be a stroll for anyone. And yet even Liverpool are being portrayed as middling champions, placeholders, a default option. This season Arne Slot’s team have beaten the champions of Spain, the champions of Germany, the champions of France and the champions of England (twice), all without conceding a goal. At what point do you actually get to be good? Sometimes someone else just deserved it more.
Still, the zero-sum game insists second must be failure. So we get the endlessly churning Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the certainty there is some fatal malady waiting to be diagnosed. Which isn’t to say there aren’t elements to improve. Even trophy-winning teams carry flaws. Arsenal have lost or drawn games they should have won. How unforgivable are the key charges?
The most obvious fatal flaw is not signing a dedicated goalscorer in the past 18 months. In outline it does look simple. Scoring more goals, having someone in double figures by now. Surely this would, on balance, be good. Why would anyone actively choose to have Mikel Merino up front and not, say, Alexander Isak?
But how easy is this in practice? How irrational are the choices that led to it? Arsenal began the season with an attack built around Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz, Gabriel Martinelli, Gabriel Jesus and Martin Ødegaard, the same attack that helped them score 91 goals in the league last season, a title-trending number.
In the event every single one of these attackers has been injured for a significant period. Saka and Ødegaard, the key axis, have played 10 league games together. Injuries should be factored in. Always add, even from a position of strength. But this also has to be a player good enough to operate in the system as well as score goals, while also falling within budget, being available and fitting with the culture Arteta has constructed out of the slightly broken environment he inherited.
There is surely a door somewhere along this route, a fork in the road that could have averted a situation where you’re trying to win the league with a jobbing midfielder playing up front. But how many of these candidates actually exist in world football? The club tried, couldn’t find the right outstanding player at the right price and took the view that sometimes the best move is not to make a move at all.
after newsletter promotion
If evidence were needed as to how hard this is, how ill-fitting transfers can also be destructive, enter Sunday’s opponents Manchester United, the most wasteful desperation-spenders in world football. Rejecting this model entirely, refusing to splurge when a player doesn’t quite hit all your vectors. Is this really such a crime? It is at least consistent with the elements that have taken Arteta’s Arsenal this far. A misstep, but a logical one. Fatal flaw verdict: not guilty.
The second most common falling-short in the current analysis is a basic lack of discipline, a brittleness, as expressed in red cards (more than anyone else in the league), and a habit of over-celebrating each step, too hyped, too desperate for it all to work.
There has been justifiable frustration at times this season, an inability to win when winning would have meant most, forcing Liverpool to play their own games with footsteps at their back. Wrapped up in this is the sense that even the injuries are in some sense self-induced, that what Arsenal are guilty of is too much intensity, an excessive focus on winning the same way, running their own players thin.
There is perhaps something in this. Albeit, as fatal flaws go, there are plenty of worse ones around. Again Sunday’s opponents are an ideal counterexample, a club that presents itself repeatedly as the opposite of this, soul-sick, low-throttle, frightened of its own shadow.
If Arteta’s Arsenal seem too intense, if there is unease at a manager who announces he would rather die than see his team slacken off in pursuit of the distant league leaders – Mikel, all good, but let’s take the death stuff out, yeah? – then it is important to remember the nature of the environment Arteta inherited.
That Arsenal were characterised as similarly decadent, defined by senior players failing to pull their weight, weighed down by United-level negativity. Weeding this out, instilling that intensity, was always the keynote of the entire rebuild. Intensity was Arteta’s version of Ruben Amorim’s wingbacks-or-die philosophy. Total commitment was his three at the back. This was the one non-negotiable. Even the obvious missteps, the unfortunate remarks about Saka just needing to be ready to play 70 games a season, about Havertz’s gene-based indestructibility (enter: random hamstring injury) spring from it.
Arteta was always a risky appointment, then 37 years old and in his first proper job. The positive outcomes are so obvious: back in the Champions League, happy dressing room, clear playing identity, young players showing the best of themselves. A tendency towards excessive intensity seems a small price to pay, consistent with the good parts – just as sticking with the manager and absorbing the bumps in the road are also the opposite of the Manchester United playbook of the past 10 years.
Perhaps Arteta’s most interesting comment in the wake of the 7-1 win at PSV Eindhoven (Does this count as good? Are we OK with it?) is that the Champions League can now offer his team “a different energy”, a competition where they are naturally less invested. For now, if there is any lesson to be drawn from a trip to Old Trafford, the ghost ship, the meat grinder, it is simply to count the good bits as well as the bad, and always to be careful what you wish for.
